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you’ll have to end up agreeing that neither is a table a table—it only seems to be a table. Well, that’s what the hippopotamus seems to be. So how can you prove that something is not something else, when neither is something else some other thing? There’s nothing to prove.
    This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance. You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity. But Science is established preposterousness. We divide all intellection: the obviously preposterousness and the established.
    But Krakatoa: that’s the explanation that the scientists gave. I don’t know what whopper the medicine men told.
    We see, from the start, the very strong inclination of science to deny, as much as it can, external relations of this earth.
    This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth. We take the position that our data have been damned, upon no consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth. This is attempted positiveness. We take the position that science can no more succeed than, in a similar endeavor, could the Chinese, or than could the United States. So then, with only pseudo-consideration of the phenomena of 1883, or as an expression of positivism in its aspect of isolation, or unrelatedness, scientists have perpetrated such an enormity as suspension of volcanic dust seven years in the air—disregarding the lapse of several years—rather than to admit the arrival of dust from somewhere beyond this earth. Not that scientists themselves have ever achieved positiveness, in its aspect of unitedness, among themselves—because Nordenskjold, before 1883, wrote a great deal upon his theory of cosmic dust, and Prof. Cleveland Abbe contended against the Krakatoan explanation—but that this is the orthodoxy of the main body of scientists.
    My own chief reason for indignation here:
    That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities.
    It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that this earth’s atmosphere has such sustaining power.
    Later, we shall have data of things that have gone up in the air and that have stayed up—somewhere—weeks—months—but not by the sustaining power of this earth’s atmosphere. For instance, the turtle of Vicksburg. It seems to me that it would be ridiculous to think of a good-sized turtle hanging, for three or four months, upheld only by the air, over the town of Vicksburg. When it comes to the horse and the barn—I think that they’ll be classics someday, but I can never accept that a horse and a barn could float several months in this earth’s atmosphere.
    The orthodox explanation:
    See the Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society. It comes out absolutely for the orthodox explanation—absolutely and beautifully, also expensively. There are 492 pages in the “Report,” and forty plates, some of them marvelously colored. It was issued after an investigation that took five years. You couldn’t think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively. The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and persistences—
    Annual Register, 1883-105:
    That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred;
    Knowledge, 5-418:
    That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption.

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    Inertia and its inhospitality.
    Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
    We shall have a few data initiatorily.
    I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities.
    The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
    Hailstones, for instance. One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the size of hens’ eggs. One smiles. Nevertheless I will engage to list one hundred instances,